Greg Tomlinson

The man who may just be racing’s best chance to turn crisis into a sustainable future

by Brian de Lore
 Published 30 August 2026

Racing gets another chance to turn around its misfortunes when the new Establishment Board meets for the first time next week.

“Not yet another board/committee to add to the list of failures,” is the cynical talk getting repeated around racing communities over the past couple of weeks, an understandable view given the substandard and diminishing quality of administration that thoroughbred racing stakeholders have endured for many years.

But this time it could be different, not because the industry should give the thumbs up for a collective show of approval of the eight people named to make up this new board, but because one of the names has the credentials to fix this business on his own, if given the chance – Greg Tomlinson.

The background: In March 2025, the TAB Advisory Committee was formed to address the growing problems in both the harness and thoroughbred codes, following a briefing by TAB NZ to the Minister of Racing, Winston Peters.   

Appointing the TAB Advisory Committee

Winston and TAB Chair Bill Bernie conferred before seven successful racing people were shoulder-tapped:

Sir Peter Vela (Chair) — NZ Bloodstock/Pencarrow Stud. Sir Brendan Lindsay — Cambridge Stud. Mark Chittick — Waikato Stud. Greg Tomlinson — Nearco Stud; businessman/investor. Chris Waller — champion NZ-born, Sydney-based trainer. Ken Breckon — Breckon Farms; harness breeder/owner, and Steve Thompson — prominent harness racing owner/businessman, who came on to the committee in June 2025.

Between March and December last year, these seven horse industry leaders examined both codes, produced financial forecasts, and developed a way forward to ensure a sustainable future for both.

On the thoroughbred side, when a plan was presented to NZTR in December and rejected, repeated again in March and June, and rejected twice again, the impasse between the TAB and NZTR commenced, and the TAB refused to comply with NZTR’s financial demands on the basis that racing was unsustainable financially if they continued to run it in the same fiscally irresponsible manner.

The Advisory Committee presented NZTR with KPMG-audited evidence of the dire predicament facing both codes, which was fully explained here on this site’s previous post.

Compromise to form Establishment Board

More recently, a compromise was agreed to, with funding for stakes guaranteed for the season, on the basis that an Establishment Board be formed to pave a sustainable way forward for both codes, with two representatives from each of HRNZ, NZTR, and TAB NZ, and two independents.

Here are the eight:

Dean McKenzie

(Chair, Ind) Racing restructuring, legislation, administration

Greg Tomlinson

(Ind) Entrepreneurship, capital allocation, mergers, property

Wendie Harvey

(TAB) Governance, organisational change, legal/risk

Jason Fleming

(TAB) Wagering, finance, racing operations, Entain

Paul Humphries

(NZTR) Clubs, construction, tracks and infrastructure

Dean Lawrence

(NZTR) Tax, revenue analysis, public-sector systems

Grant Jarrold

(Harness) Accounting, audit, financial governance, elite sport

Hannah Doney

(Harness) Strategy, transformation, marketing, technology

There are people on it whose previous roles can legitimately be criticised, and there will inevitably be conflicts between representatives protecting their codes and those seeking industry-wide reform. But collectively it contains far more commercial, financial, restructuring and governance capability than most racing committees we have seen.

It’s not the Magnificent Eight, but more appropriately it could be described as the Magnificent One, plus seven others.

Greg Tomlinson may not be infallible, but his career demonstrates something racing desperately needs: the ability to confront problems, allocate capital intelligently, restructure when necessary and think commercially about the long term.

He is undoubtedly the most encouraging appointment New Zealand racing has seen in years, although the Establishment Board is unlikely to exist beyond March next year. And there is no guarantee he will take an involvement beyond that point.

Writing this on Sunday, 30 August 2026, I should declare that I don’t know Greg Tomlinson, have never met him, have never spoken to him on the phone, wouldn’t recognise him if I passed him in the street, but have thoroughly researched his impressive career.

Tomlinson: successful dealmaker

He is far from a career racing administrator. In business he has spent more than four decades building, buying, restructuring and growing businesses, often on a substantial scale. He started at age 18 owning and managing businesses, firstly in Marlborough’s mussel industry. He later moved through construction, aged care, wine, pharmaceuticals and finance.

In 2006, he invested in the wine industry, became chairman of Indevin, and transformed it into New Zealand’s largest wine company with access to 20% of NZ’s wine after acquiring Villa Maria Wines.  

A group he led invested in animal-health company Argenta and transformed it from a New Zealand operation into a multi-million-dollar international business. In 2011, Tomlinson backed Heartland Bank during its formative period, helping underwrite its 2011 capital raising, became its largest shareholder and joined the board in 2013.

He is now Heartland Group Chairman, and this year the company posted a profit of $93.2 million. It is currently pursuing a proposed $620 million TSB acquisition and merger.

Tomlinson says, “Build capable teams, control costs”

More importantly, his business philosophy fits racing’s predicament almost perfectly. Tomlinson has written that boards must be prepared to make ambitious decisions, build capable teams, address poor culture, control costs and apply a disciplined approach to risk and return. These are precisely the disciplines NZ racing has lacked.

But even more importantly, Greg Tomlinson understands racing from the inside, and has been breeding thoroughbreds ever since he could afford to. His Nearco Stud breeds from roughly 40 high-quality mares, and is credited with Hong Kong champion Beauty Generation, whose career earnings exceeded HK$100 million; Nearco Stud was NZ Breeder of the Year in 2019. His recent breeding interests have also produced horses such as Kovalica, Aeliana, She’s A Hustler and rising star, Perlino.

Greg Tomlinson is reputedly a strong character in the boardroom, and he will need to be to overcome some of the hurdles he may face when the Establishment Board meets for the first time next week.

He has been described as a dealmaker who does transactions in the hundreds of millions and then integrates and restructures the assets. He’s never been an executive, but has climbed the ranks on sheer ability, with his directorships secured through personal investment.

Establishment Board Terms of Reference unknown

The Terms of Reference for the Establishment Board is unknown at this point of time, but the thinking is that the work done by the TAB Advisory Committee will dominate the agenda, and Greg Tomlinson is the only Advisory Committee member seconded to the Establishment Board – for obvious reasons.

Tomlinson should be carefully listened to as he is a genuinely successful New Zealand entrepreneur and investor, with a track record of building, financing, scaling, buying and selling businesses across several completely different industries. Racing is no different to any other business, and Tomlinson is not simply a wealthy racehorse breeder who has been put on a committee.

The process the Establishment Board will follow is to determine what changes should be made to ensure both codes are sustainable for the long haul, with any agreements reached having to be ratified by a 60% ‘yes vote’ vote at each code’s respective AGM to be held before the end of November.

The prospective introduction of a ‘One Racing’ model to administer both codes and save on costs, and the $700 Strategic Property Vehicle are likely to be the two most argued topics. If the board come to an agreement, they then have to get a mandate from the clubs to proceed.

Mandate required for change

Hopefully, the racing clubs of NZ will do something they have never previously done – vote for what’s best for racing holistically, and not what’s only best for their patch of dirt. Everyone should know by now that racing has to change its structure or suffer the consequences.

The industry certainly has an appetite for change. A month ago, a bid to call a Special General Meeting (SGM) in September to change the NZTR Constitution to abolish the Members’ Council and ultimately replace the entire NZTR board at the Annual General Meeting in November was mooted in a letter to the clubs but failed on the presumption it would not get the 60% support it was asking for.

The TAB Advisory Committee clearly warned racing of the precipice the industry was about to fall into if change didn’t arrive.

The status quo for another Groundhog Day for Einstein’s definition of stupidity is no longer an option for clubs to still be operational in a decade’s time. .

If you studied the history of the successful administrators of the NZ thoroughbred industry, you would learn that they possessed a passion and deep knowledge of racing, often backed up by significant personal investments as breeders or owners, or both.

A former Chairman of the NZ Racing Conference recently described them as ‘the Captains of Industry who possessed a lifetime passion for racing’. It’s not a coincidence that Greg Tomlinson more or less fits that criteria

The infiltration of NZTR by the Institute of Directors, a cartel of dubious characters banded together for self-interest to help each other secure paid directorships, has to cease.

The Harvard Business Review referred to this corporate underworld a few years ago in a paper titled “Where Boards Fall Short.”

It stated, “Boards aren’t working. They aren’t delivering on their core mission: providing strong oversight and strategic support for management’s efforts to create long-term value.

“This isn’t just out opinion,” said the researchers. “The directors themselves also admit boards are falling short. Our research found that only 34% of the 772 directors surveyed by McKinsey agreed that the boards on which they served fully understood their companies’ strategies.

“Only 22% said their boards were completely aware of how their firms created value, and just 16% claimed that their boards had a strong understanding of the dynamics of their firms’ industries.”

NZTR directors have not admitted they are falling short, and that lies at the heart of the difference and the problem. NZTR is not a company, but it has stakeholders and 40,000-plus people reliant on its directors’ fiduciary duty to keep them employed, part-time employed or volunteers secure for the long term.

According to its own forecasts for FY26-FY30, NZTR predicted a $63 million deficit, with stakes remaining flat through FY30. That is why the TAB NZ-NZTR impasse occurred – the TAB Advisory Committee concluded that NZTR operational costs had soared well above reasonable limits and the future looked desperate.